


New York, 1989

by In_agony_and_ecstasy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: AIDS era, Angst, Canon Muslim Character, Crisis of Faith, Cuddling, Established Relationship, Flirting, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Kissing, M/M, New York, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Period Piece, Prayer, Religion, Sensuality, canon Catholic character, canonverse, faith - Freeform, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25512154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_agony_and_ecstasy/pseuds/In_agony_and_ecstasy
Summary: It's the peak of the AIDS crisis in New York. Nicky and Joe have taken a break from missions to accompany the bedsides of patients dying of AIDS in varying New York hospitals. After, Nicky confides in Joe about the inner turmoil he's experiencing because of the AIDS crisis, and the two of them comfort each other's worries regarding their immortality and the potential loss of it.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 41
Kudos: 180





	New York, 1989

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, I'm not Muslim or Catholic. 
> 
> So if you spot something off about my depiction of either faith, especially if it's something offensive, and especially if it's something Islamophobic, PLEASE tell me. I'll either edit it or delete it entirely. I meant for this to be a piece that respects religion, and if that's not something it does, I want to change it. 
> 
> Likewise, if you speak Arabic or Italian and you spot something I've written that's written incorrectly or can't be translated right or whatever, let me know. I want to get it right. 
> 
> Also: I don't fucking know how to spell Nicky's name, okay? I've seen a dozen Italians on tumblr adamantly stating it's spelled one way or another and the only thing I gleaned from those posts for sure is that there needs to be an accent on the last 'o'. So if you're Italian and you're reading this and you're thinking, "I can't believe this American spelled it with one 'c' that's why. I'm sorry.

When I woke for Fajr, Nicky had already left for the hospital. It was all I could do to focus on my prayer for its duration, rather than think about Nicky waking while it was still dark to dress himself in black and slip on his priest’s collar before leaving. 

No doubt he’d arrive at the hospital long before visiting hours – which was the earliest I’d be permitted in – and ask the nurses and doctors there to allow him to accompany the bedsides of their many dying AIDS patients. 

If it was a good day, like most days before this, he’d be allowed to if only because the staff couldn’t stand to acknowledge those patients’ existence, let alone care one way or another about some random priest with a death wish. They’d wave him away the moment he uttered his request, in disgust, which he would accept gratefully because it meant he wouldn’t be disturbed while taking confession and administering last rites to those whose last day of life would be today. 

However, if it was a bad day, there would be someone working nearly as devout as Nicky, but in the opposite direction – or so I liked to think of it – who would insist that Nicky not tarnish his hands or clothing, or worse, his holy reputation by allowing himself in their presence. 

I hoped today was a good day.

For the sake of that doctor, more than anything, who would have to listen to more than a few choice words from Nicky about where the Doctor intended to spend his afterlife. I also hoped it was a good day for the sake of Nicky’s teeth. He’d been gritting them a great deal lately.

After praying, I boiled two eggs and peeled an orange. Eating this modest breakfast would be the only moment of peace I had for the rest of the day, so I savored. Then I went back to bed, because visiting hours didn’t begin until ten in the morning and the wait between now and when I could reasonably leave would drag like time did before clocks existed. 

… 

I pulled on a jacket, bracing myself for the winter chill, and left to join Nicky. Though most patients at the hospital of choice today would be Christian, there would be Muslims too, who might want someone to say Shahada to or pray with. And possibly, plenty of people who’d had enough religion for a lifetime, who would just want company. I wanted to be whichever or whoever any of them needed in the moment. It didn’t feel like much, when facing someone with sores on his face or skin so pallid I could count the veins – but it was all I could do, and I would do it. 

For most, I claimed to be a family member, since I could not claim to be a priest and the staff wouldn’t let anyone else unrelated in. They gave me looks when, one after the other, I claimed to be their relative. Nonetheless, given the ambiguity of my complexion and age, plus the desperate insistence on part of the patient that I was, in fact, their brother, father, son – one man, a boy really, seventeen at most, so delirious there by the end that upon seeing me believed I actually _was_ his father, come to forgive him and make amends before his death later that afternoon – the staff didn’t care enough to background check. As long as it was clear I wasn’t a lover, I could be their relative. I could be that boy’s father for a few hours, to them and to him. 

…

That night, well after visiting hours had ended, Nicky and I arrived home. Well, not really home. In all the centuries we’d lived through, he and I had dwelt in hundreds of huts, tents, apartments, castles, trenches, hostiles, pueblos, houses, mansions, boats, cars, bungalows and hotels. Many more than we could both remember even, I assumed. And out of all of them, there were but a handful I thought of as a home. 

This rent-controlled studio apartment without central heating or furniture save for a mattress and some lawn chairs in front of the TV with a broken antenna was…not one of them. I almost smiled though, as I hung up my jacket on the coatrack. It wasn’t home, but we’d only been here a few months. Nicky and I had lived in much worse conditions in places that smelled a lot worse than here, and as long as he was here, it had the potential. 

Sometimes it was so easy to forget what life had been like before TV existed. Before electricity. And always so funny to me with each new invention of each new staple household item, that it had ever been easy – rather, natural, obvious – to live without it. 

I needed nothing except Nicolò.

Glancing at him now, he was standing at the only window we had, looking out through crooked blinds at the passerby on the street below us. We lived above a bodega, which I liked, because it meant at all hours of the day and night I could hear people haggling in a great variety of languages that felt familiar on my ears as a song stuck in my head. 

“What is it, _amore mio_?” I asked, in Italian, now that no one was around to hear us speak it. Though, if ever there was a place we could speak however we want and not stand out so much, it was New York. Still, Andy warned us always to be cautious in places like America where all the signs were in one language. 

He sighed, and I wondered if I shouldn’t change the subject. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already know what was on his mind. We’d been at this for months and nothing was changing. I had never seen him like this. The pain in his eyes was not familiar to me. It was not like the pain in his eyes during any other plague, nor like the pain in his eyes during any other war, nor even, the pain in his eyes when someone – with their eyes or words or hands – tried to make us ashamed of our love. Yet at the same time, it was. 

The pain in his eyes was some unholy combination of the three, and my chest ached just to know such a pain existed let alone in him. 

“I don’t know which hurts more,” he said now, turning to watch me ease on to our mattress. He blinked, and a long moment passed without him speaking. Longer than he realized, I was sure, but I didn’t press him. I hadn’t in many years. 

He continued. “The men who ask me to forgive them for being homosexual, or the men who insist that it was a needle. Or a blood transfusion. Or that they were so drunk they must have been confused. Must have slept with a convincing drag queen one night, a – I can’t even use the words they used and not gag, Joe. A – a _deceptive prostitute_. And of course, supposedly forgotten by morning.” 

I crossed my arms behind my head while I considered how to respond. As I did, Nicky removed his priest’s collar and placed it on the floor beside the bed, next to his sword. He unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it. The low lamp light glinted off his skin, as flawless as the day he was born. I reached for him, trailing my fingers down the length of his back. He sighed again, but this time it sounded sweet rather than bitter. Finally, he spun around and laid down next to me, resting his head on my chest. 

“They don’t know better,” I finally said. “They have not lived in any time when or place where it wasn’t something to hide.” 

“There was a senator at the hospital today,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. 

“A senator?” I asked, convincing myself I misheard him. 

“Yes. He refused every bed he was offered that was next to another patient until finally they gave him his own room. I barely entered before he was defending himself, telling me he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t one of them. He told me he got it from a blood transfusion. He must have told me it was because of a blood transfusion a dozen times before I even sat down. You have no idea…how hard it was for me to not ask him why he’d needed a blood transfusion.”

I snorted, though I knew he was not saying this to be humorous. Still, I wished he’d just done it. I would have. I would have paid to see him do it. 

“I could have killed him, Joe,” Nicky said. 

That wiped the smile off my face. Unlike most people, when Nicolò said this, he meant it. He wanted to, and he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He would never harm someone – let alone kill someone – who wasn’t trying to do the same to him or another. That didn’t stop him from wishing people like this senator would die. Or more accurately maybe, never be taught to be that way. 

“We’re dying,” he breathed now, his voice shaking. “We’re dying because people like him with power do not have the courage to make other people with power give a damn. This is not like any other plague we’ve seen, Joe. They do not want this one to end. They are grateful for this one. It is killing the people they hate and because it is a disease and not a weapon they can say it is God’s doing. They can say God created this disease to kill off the homeless and drug-addicted and homosexual and transsexual people and – and –”

“Nicky, Nicky,” I uttered into his hair, “ _Amore mio_.” I wiped away his tears with my free hand, and kept at it until he stopped crying. 

“I’m telling you,” he said, “Nothing has tested my faith like this since the last time I killed you.” 

I let out a long exhale. 

Through the centuries, my faith had been tested every day since the first day I laid eyes on him. Not even the first time I killed him. The first time I saw, across the battlefield, him kneel in front of a wounded soldier to protect him. Nicky who, at the time, as far as the both of us knew, could die like anyone else, without hesitation, knelt in front of a wounded soldier who would likely die anyway, so as to give him the smallest chance to survive.

I had gone into a trance, watching Nicky speak to the man he was shielding, with an expression on his face so calming I could not fathom being a wounded soldier on the ground looking into his eyes and believing myself about to die. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, not over the sounds of weapons clashing and men screaming and horses galloping and trees burning. But I felt what the man bleeding out on the ground felt. What he must have felt. Ought to have felt. Relieved. Relieved that if it was the end, that this was his ending. That he was leaving this world this way, and not some other way. With this man at his side. Nicolò.

Since that day, I’d wrestled with my faith. Sometimes overcoming for decades at a time, others losing for just as long. Only in the last couple of centuries had I found some balance. The ability to separate the love I had for my God and the hatred I had for what man could do in his name. 

I cleared my throat. “That is not why God created this disease.”

“I know it’s not. But I don’t know why he did,” he breathed. 

“It was so that you would have the opportunity to kill that senator,” I said, tilting his head up to meet my gaze. “And by God, Nicky, you blew it.”

Finally, he cracked a smile at me and I felt the light from it warm my spirit. 

“Only barely.”

“Did you at least refuse to take his bullshit confession?” 

“Of course I didn’t,” he said. “I did, however, tell him that I would be back for his last rites. That I was counting the days.”

I grinned at him and kissed his forehead. “Good.”

“The only thing that keeps me going is telling them – everyone else of course, not the senator – that homosexuality isn’t a sin. Transsexuality isn’t a sin. God hates the rich and Jesus kept company with prostitutes. Joe – I wish you could see them. How many of them cry. How many of them smile for the first time since they were admitted. How many of them can’t believe they’ve heard me right, and ask me to repeat myself. Over and over.”

“Oh, I have an idea,” I said. “I tell people the same, you know. And in any case – One patient and I heard a woman you were talking to from the other end of the ward. Laughing. Made us smile. The nurses were gossiping too. About the handsome priest who’s so brave for talking to these patients and can’t tell he’s being flirted with and ‘It’s too bad he can’t get married’ and ‘Do you think he’s actually celibate?’”

He swatted at my chest, comically half-hearted, and I laughed. 

“What?” I said, “It’s true.”

“You must have found the only two nurses in the state who think so,” he said, “Most of them just suspect the only way a priest would bother with these patients is if he doesn’t like women. Which just offends them.”

“Well,” I said, “I would be too if I found out I had no chance with you.” 

He tilted his head up to smile at me, and then turned over on to his stomach so that he could kiss me. Only then did I realize I hadn’t kissed him all day and I deepened it, not wanting it to break – though I knew it would. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want it. I knew he did. Even if he hadn’t reassured me he did, I could feel it in the lingering of his fingertips on my chest or back when we kissed like this. 

The last time we made love he cried after. I had been at a loss for words, scared in a way I’d never been before, because I didn’t know what I’d do if I had crossed a line of some sort. 

But he curled back into my bare chest, wrapped his arm around my waist and clung to me. 

“I should be grateful we can’t get it,” he breathed, and I understood. 

“You feel guilty for this?” I asked, as I gestured to our clammy, spent bodies. “Why? You know – we couldn’t make each other sick anyway. We have no other partners.”

He nodded, but not because it helped anything. 

“It doesn’t feel right,” he said. “That we’ve gotten so much time together and – and can do this,” he said, gesturing to his leg hooked over mine, “as much as we want while – while thousands of men just like us who have had so – so little _time_ , Joe. So little time with their other half and now are dying alone. They can’t even – can’t even – _Yusuf, I can’t bear to die without you by my side when I know I’ll come back. Let alone…_ ,” he said, transitioning from Italian to Ligurian as he spoke. Ligurian was his first language and his most emotional one. The language I prided myself on luring out of him when I made love to him and longed to hear in his happiest of moments and was pained to hear in his saddest. 

“ _Can you even imagine how little time they’ve had? A blink, Yusuf. A blink with the person they love. Why are we different?_ ”

“Look at me, _amore mio_ ,” I said, and he did. I wrapped my arms more tightly around him. “You are still alive because you are so good, and patient, and kind, and understanding and forgiving, that the world can’t afford to lose you yet. The men who are dying of this disease – will die and see with their own eyes what you’ve already told them. That God loves them, and that they have done nothing wrong. That is what you need to be thinking about, _amore mio_. Their suffering is about to end. The worst they’ll ever experience they’ll have gotten over with during their very short time on Earth.” 

He smiled slightly, and kissed me as a form of gratitude before standing up to dress himself. Though I knew I’d made him feel somewhat better that day, since then, I’d held myself back, waiting for him to initiate again when he was ready. It wasn’t as though we had no time to waste and all that mattered to me was his comfort. I wanted him to enjoy himself. To be truly happy when we did it again. I didn’t want him to be fighting some sort of guilt. Guilt of that sort, so closely related to shame, belonged in our past. 

Now, Nicky parted our lips and exhaled against my chest in a way that made it clear to me whatever weight he’d carried home with him from the hospital had been lifted. He was himself again, and would be for the rest of the night. However little of it was left.

“I wish we could grow old together,” he said.

I kissed his forehead. “We will.”

He deadpanned at me. “Not if we keep working. Keep doing missions. We die too much when we do.”

I shook my head at him and laced our fingers together. “One day…one night…I am going to leave a mark on you with my teeth,” I breathed, leaning in to press my lips against his throat, “And finally have the pleasure of not seeing it disappear right away. Then we’ll know. No more missions.”

His smirk teased me. “And if I lose my immortality during a mission?” 

I shrugged. “I am just going to have to test it. Often. You’ll have to start letting me even on missions. Just one mark. Every – oh, hour or so, should do.” 

“You know,” he said, fighting a smile. “I’d have to do the same to you.”

I shrugged. “That’s a bullet I’m willing to take.” 

He snorted. “I’m sure poor Andy and Booker have not already had enough displays of our affection.”

I feigned offense. “But it’s to save your life.”

He grinned at me. “ _You are my life_ ,” he said, transitioning into Arabic, as he often did when he was feeling particularly affectionate to me. I loved how Arabic sounded in his accent. I wished to hear him speak it like this forever. 

I pulled him in by the nape of his neck and kissed him, slowly, cradling his face in my hand. He curled his fingers in my hair and sighed into the kiss, before pulling away. He pressed his forehead against mine.

“What if one of us loses it before the other,” he whispered now, as if afraid destiny might hear him and be tempted. “And only one of us grows old and dies.”

I swallowed and closed my eyes for a moment, unable to bear the thought and unwilling to show him the fear that no doubt clouded my eyes. We so rarely discussed this, which meant this was a testament to the emotional state these months spent visiting hospitals had left him in. Any other fear we could talk about. The fear of being separated. The fear of being captured. The fear of being buried or sunk like Quynh. The fear even, of both of us dying on a mission and neither of us waking back up.

But not this. 

I looked him in the eyes. 

“I believe,” I said, my voice wavering. “That we do not lose it randomly. I believe it is a switch that only one thing can turn off. And I believe that thing is different for all of us.”

He furrowed his brow at me, listening intently. 

“I believe that thing, for me, that will switch off my immortality, is learning that yours has been switched off. The feeling that my time left with you is limited, and that a day when you’re no longer a part of this world is coming…will switch it off in me. The feeling will be so immense and … _mortifying_ …that I will not be able to wake up again the next time I die. I won’t have it in me.” 

He smiled then, but it was bittersweet now. 

“There have only been six of us. The rest have all come into being centuries apart. We’re the only two that became immortal at the same time. Sometimes I’m able to believe…that means we’re destined to lose it at the same time. I hope that, at least, _ya hayati_.” 

I kissed him again, before glancing at our digital alarm clock. I had not been able to pull away for Salat at the hospital today. Though I’d never since learning I was immortal been able to ensure I prayed five times a day everyday – particularly on missions – for most periods in my life I did what I could when I could. And Nicky too, though no longer a priest as he once was, always practiced his faith to the best of his ability. And ever since Nicky and I came to New York to participate in activism and help the patients here, I’d been – we’d been – committed to our faiths more than usual, with the exception of being too busy helping patients. 

“It’s almost midnight,” I said. “A little late for Isha but –”

“I’ll join you,” Nicky said, reaching for a white T-shirt to wear, as I stood to unfurl my prayer rug. 

A moment later he kneeled on the floor next to my rug holding an ancient rosary, normally draped around the sheath to his sword. 

…

Afterwards, he and I both undressed to shower before bed. He joined me in there too. I shampooed his hair and he glided the bar of soap over my shoulders, chest and back. Neither of us could do either action without stopping to press our lips against one another’s skin here or there. And then, after we were both clean, I held him there for a long time, even though the water-pressure was weak and it ran cold too soon. 

In bed, with my back against the wall, and an arm wrapped around his waist, we listened to people walking outside, buying food and coffee at the bodega and stopping at the traffic light. 

“Do you ever worry I’ll go to one afterlife, and you another?” he asked. 

I inhaled deeply. “I used to. When we were still young.”

“But not anymore?”

“No,” I said.

He rolled on to his back so that he could face me. “I do.”

“Don’t. When we die…we’ll take different flights. Land at different gates. But it’ll be the same place.” 

He smiled wide enough his eyes crinkled and his irises glistened like the night sky. “That would be nice, _ya hayati_.”

“It will be,” I said and kissed him again long and hard.

He rolled back over, and I waited until his breathing and the thrum of his heart against my chest steadied, before letting my own eyes ease shut.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it <3


End file.
